Since ultimately one will buy some of these reissues for the
performances let me start with a few comments about them. The Beethoven
9th is very good and those for whom Karajan's approach in 1976 is
satisfying will find they can hear more from the original master tapes
than they have ever heard before from previous reissues. The acoustic
of the Philharmonie gives a nice spaciousness to Karajan's dramatic and
large-scale interpretation. For me this is less well recorded, less
incisive and less well sung than his 1963 recording with Janowitz,
Rössel-Majdan, Kmentt and Berry, but it must be admitted that such
judgements probably derive from the performance one grew up with rather
than any absolute standard. Karajan is one of the finest Beethoven
interpreters we have ever had and no performance can be dismissed.
Anne-Sophie Mutter is a great violinist and plays with the expected
technical excellence and with great feeling. However, I did find her
very self indulgent in her approach to Beethoven's Olympian
masterpiece. She repeatedly phrases in a romantic manner which better
suits Brahms or Mendelssohn. I wanted her to leave Beethoven to decide
what this music is about. Masur's New Yorkers are pushed a little too
far back in the sound picture to allow their vital contribution to
tell. I can think of several other performances I much prefer.

Ferenc Friscay gives three performances of burning intensity. The
Dvořák is very individual, varying from indulgently lyrical to fiery
and intense. Smetana's famous symphonic poem contains the most dramatic
waterfall I have ever heard and the Liszt is as portentous as it needs
to be. The Berlin RSO play superbly and with great individuality. These
old recordings come from before the age of smooth modern orchestras who
all sound much the same. They are quite unique and interestingly
different to Karajan's Berliners. The recordings are a bit fierce,
probably due to tape saturation at climaxes, but amazingly clear and
very stereophonic indeed. For recordings nearly 55 years old they sound
well. For the very finest sound one has to hear Jonas Kaufmann's
excellent and recent Wagner recital. He truly is "the tenor we have
been waiting for" as it says on the box, quoting the Washington Post.
With Runnicles and the Deutsche Oper forces playing their hearts out,
this is a superb disc. Personally I find Wagner in bleeding chunks to
be distasteful, but for those more tolerant this is a magnificent
display of musical talent and recording excellence.

On to the technical issues of this new venture by Universal Music.
Other companies have been issuing Blu-ray Audio - BDA as we can call it
- for some years. Naxos and 2L being the most obvious examples. Dan
Morgan's article Blu-ray Audio: gimmick or game-changer?
is well worth reading for the background. Universal have gone for a
common format on this series. All the insert booklets are derived from
previous incarnations of the material, thus that accompanying the
Kaufmann has an interview, that for the Fricsay has a consideration of
his career and so on. Whether the composer or the music gets much
space, varies a lot. The on-screen menu has just track numbers without
details, for that one must study the box. The discs on my machines
simply started playing track 1 at load up and default to the PCM sound
codec. If you want to listen to, say, Vltava on Fricsay's disc
you must select it while the Dvořák starts without asking permission. I
find this an unmusical decision. Discs should load and then wait to be
told what track to play. At least we are not plagued with music over
the menus as happens in almost all Blu-ray videos. The selection of the
sound codec is also something that cannot be done in advance. If you
want to use the Dolby Digital True HD track then you have to allow the
disc to start in PCM and accept the small break as the player changes
over: another curious decision. The sound seemed similar on each of the
three tracks offered and I am at a loss to understand quite why
Universal offer all three, two would be enough even if multi-channel
arrives as they suggest it might (see below). I spot checked different
sound tracks on all discs without noticing significant changes of
quality. Perhaps they can explain.

I was
quite disturbed to find my main player unable to spin any of these
discs silently, or to even play the DTS-MA track on Beethoven's 9th
without severe digital noise. Other players were called into use and
one also could not play the DTS-MA on Beethoven's 9th but managed all
the others, and a further two players had no problems with anything. My
attempt to contact Universal about this failed to produce a response so
I am left in the dark as to what strange gremlins are at play. No other
discs of any sort in years of use have caused such issues. Nevertheless
it may just be me. Fellow reviewers have not so far reported any such
problems.

All the recordings in this first batch were stereo but on the box inner
cover Universal have explicitly left open the possibility of 5.1
surround being offered in future. Since the vaults at Universal must
contain a lot of previously unreleased multi-channel material from the
ill-fated quadraphony experiment of the 1970s this might give us some
exciting future issues, if, that is, this format has a future. With
downloads on the rise I am not sure that enough of these will be
purchased to justify the experiment. The same company has released two
earlier discs with little fanfare. One was the famous Solti Ring on one
Blu-ray disc packed quietly in the back of a huge 16 disc CD reissue
for top money: £180+. The other was equally surreptitiously included in
a boxed set of two CDs and one Blu-ray of Britten's War Requiem. The single Solti Blu-ray contained the entire 14+ hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen and the Britten a mere 82 minutes of the War Requiem, both incidentally in magnificent sound. See above for the extremely moderate timings of the current issues. So why not all
the Beethoven symphonies from Karajan for example? A little extra:
inside the box is a coupon with a passcode which encourages one to
download all the tracks on the disc from hfpureaudio.com. I tried this
with one disc and found that the files are not even remotely high
definition but just 256/kbs MP3 files for use on one's iPod or
whatever, so of no interest to people in search of 'Pure Audio'.